Living a Feminist Life

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Maybe you adopt for yourself a certain kind of fatalism: these things happen; what happens will happen; whatever will be, will be. All of this is beautifully compared to variety of traditional feminist texts, such as Mrs Dalloway, Audre Lorde, and the writings of George Eliot.

In Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work.I wasn't a fan of the writing style, and I wasn't getting enough out of it to continue slogging through. Read it, use it, give it to your daughters and especially to your sons – and relish being a killjoy: if nothing else, it’s really cathartic. Incredibly powerful as it resonates with so many personal experiences regarding feminist-killjoying.

There is a distinct hope and optimism for the future of diversity work – but still a demand for better. The film is dystopic: many of the promises of that socialist revolution are shown to have been empty; there is sexism; there is sexual harassment; there are cuts to services for women who are victims of rape; there is unemployment and poverty that disproportionately affects brown and black communities; there is disaffection; there is despair; there is depression; there is oppression.

Being girl is a way of being taught what it is to have a body: you are being told; you will receive my advances; you are object; thing, nothing. Animates the hope that women might break the walls between us and transcend our different standpoints. To make a manifesto out of the killjoy means being willing to give to others the support you received or wish you received. An image was conjured in my mind, derived not only from my own experience but from this instruction, of a stranger. Indeed, if you do not modify your behavior in accordance, if you are not careful and cautious, you can be made responsible for the violence directed toward you (look at what you were drinking, look at what you wearing, look at where you were, look look).

Ahmed also explores the idea of how people label those who complain about these injustices as killjoys. You begin to feel a pressure, this relentless assault on the senses; a body in touch with a world can become a body that fears the touch of a world. The happiness path becomes a straight path: what leads you in the right way, to the right destination. It is, I think, going to be much more meaningful to women of color and to queer women of color in particular, but white women should read it, too, because sometimes we are the problem and we need to hear it and do better. Her killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto at the end of the book both act as gems, with strategies for disrupting the status quo as well as taking care of your soul.When those who are behind question those in front, they are assumed to put themselves in front, to care only about themselves. We all have different biographies of violence, entangled as they are with so many aspects of ourselves: things that happen because of how we are seen; and how we are not seen.

But this is not a weakness; she clarifies and distillate all of her arguments, develops them further, and applies them to concrete examples. The word sensational relates both to the faculty of sensation and to the arousal of strong curiosity, interest, or excitement. I began the first chapter of my book Strange Encounters by evoking this image: the stranger as a shadowy figure with a "grey mac shimmering at your feet" (Ahmed 2000, 19). Not to think like a feminist, but what it is like to stand up to people who are screaming for you to be silenced. Just within the intro I was tripped up multiple times thinking I had accidentally re-read the same sentence, but in fact Ahmed had repeated the same words twice (or more) within a sentence with a very minor adjustment that didn't add to her point.

My only slightly negative comment would be the repetition of the author - not just in the book but in a following sentence. Language is already imprecise, so for every connecting-the-dots moment there was another moment of wondering what to make of a tangled mess. It’s not easy being a feminist and Sara Ahmed has written a powerful, thought provoking and moving account of just what that means. The declaration of injustice, we might note, becomes, in the story, yet another piece of evidence of the child’s willfulness. Ahmed’s Killjoy is also deeply collectivist, group oriented and maintains a delicate balance between the altruism necessary for the well-being of others and egoism required for the well-being of self: in this her activist figure is profoundly different from the right wing killjoy invoked by late capitalist individualism and powerfully channelled by Trump and his populist posse (the right populism of Trump, Orban and the like is also collectivist, but in an inward looking homogenising form that lacks the altruism necessary for the well-being of the Other/ed, aiming instead to bring about the end of the Other/ed).